There are many contexts in which an interviewer needs to elicit information from a human subject. The interviewer might be a service provider, or a consumer of services. The subject might be a client, a customer, a patient, or, indeed, a service provider. In the health care context, for example, an emergency medical technician might need to determine how to care for a sick or injured patient. The measures to be taken could depend upon measurements, observations, questioning of the patient, questioning of friends and family, and witnesses. In addition to asking questions, the interviewer might need to issue instructions associated with the interview or with the treatment process.
When the interviewer and the subject do not speak a common language, their ability to communicate will be severely limited. In the context of a medical emergency, this is particularly problematic because of the urgency for an appropriate remedial response. According to the National Virtual Translation Center (NVTC) of the United States Government (http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/USlanguages.html), more than 300 languages are spoken in the United States today. Of course, the interviewer and interviewee might both be multilingual, but any system needs to deal with the common case where the interviewer and interviewee each speak a single language, and those languages are different. According to the NVTC, about 80 percent of United States residents speak only English. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, of about 168,065 residents nationally who speak Hmong, for example, about 28 percent speak English “not well” or “not at all.” (http://www.mla.org/map_data_langlistmode=lang_tops)
Lee (U.S. Patent Application 2003/0208352 A1) describes prior art approaches to interviewer/interviewee translation, including: translation by the interviewer; translation by family and friends; ad hoc interpretation by third parties; translation by professionals; and use of foreign language phrase books. As an improvement over these prior art approaches, Lee teaches the use of a computer if the information to be translated is routine. Questions presented to the interviewee can be in yes/no or multiple-choice forms. The interviewee may also be expected to respond to some questions by typing a number into a field. As an alternative to a personal computer (PC), Lee suggests that the system might be implemented on a personal digital assistant (PDA). A particular embodiment of Lee's approach utilizes a docked tablet computer on a rotating turntable. The tablet computer includes a touch tablet with a graphical user interface shared by the interviewer and interviewee. Questions are transmitted to the interviewee by means of text printed on the computer screen and audio transmitted by speakers. Instructions may be issued to the interviewee in audio or printed form. The information collected is not stored in the translation device. As a preliminary task, the language of the interviewee must be identified. Lee presents a method wherein languages are presented for interviewee choice, each language represented as a national flag accompanied by the name of the language written in that language.
The choice of questions obviously depends on the purpose of the interview. In some limited circumstances, the series of questions might be linear; that is, questions can be asked without deviation from a specific known sequence. For example, once it has been determined that hospital services will be paid for with a credit card, the questions to be answered follow linearly; namely, credit card type, credit card number, verification code, name on the card, and expiration date. However, some branching in the line of questioning is necessary in most interviews. In the hospital payment example, the subject will typically be asked first what form of payment will be used. Depending on the answer—cash, check, or credit card—a branch in the line of questioning to a context-specific sequence of follow-up questions will be required.
Bhatnagar (U.S. Patent Application 2004/0054693) teaches navigation through a tree of choices to diagnose a problem and recommend a solution. Green (U.S. Pat. No. 6,701,322) describes navigation through a series of questions in which an interviewee's response to a given question determines, through the use of a branching table, the next question that will be asked.